Welcome Home
by Doktor Al Meringue
Summary: Scout comes home, and has an interesting encounter with his mother's friends.


The taxi cab nearly hit its passenger as it peeled out from the side of the curb. A middle finger hung out of the window. The passenger returned it, along with a slur that no child on that particular sunny Boston street should ever hear again, then turned to grab his things. He caught sight of a small group of children as he wheeled around. All of them stood with their mouths hanging open, their ball bouncing out into the street, no one making a move for it.

Darn kids, he thought, picking up his bags and scowling. They'd be sure to run off to their mommies, blabbering their mouths about what they saw and who they saw doing it and he'd be in a world of hurt. People in that neighborhood were too closely-knit. Anything and everything that happened got around faster than a Ferrari stuck doing donuts in a parking lot, from the good to the bad, then evaluated by a 'committee' as to whether or not something should be done about it.

He fell under the bad.

"Scout's back!" The children chorused. Scout lunged for them; they scattered like giggling, screaming roaches back to their respective homes. He cursed quietly under his breath, but took the opportunity to haul ass inside before something else decided to ruin his day.

Immediately upon opening the door smoke assaulted the senses. A coughing fit ensued, gray wisps of cloud rushing past to the freedom of day. Spy had been so courteous to grant him permission to smoke one time: it ended in him almost needing mouth to mouth resuscitation, which, in some part of the mind, made Scout think that he'd planned that particular reaction to happen.

But that's another story for another time.

"Ma! I'm home!" Scout tossed his things by the door, as was custom.

The Scout's household wasn't a large one. The door, a little more left-centered than a normal door, opened into the living room. A wicker-topped table, small, black and white television that Scout had immediately fallen in love with from its appearance in the household all sat in the middle. Just behind that, a couch certainly a little worse for wear from seven children all leaping upon it in imitation of their comic book hero, Superman; or, when they wanted to be rebels, sometimes Batman, maybe the Flash. The living room gave an option to go into the half kitchen, which looked as if it had simply been tacked on to the upper right corner of the room. The circular dining table hung half way out of the kitchen. Stairs a little before the kitchen lead up to bedrooms.

For the longest, since the youngest older sibling had left the nest, Scout had been the "man" of the house. That meant it was his duty to come home and "care" for his mom. There had never been a dad in the picture. Though Scout knew of Ma and RED Spy's relationship - a topic of which resulted in leaving the room post haste - Spy wasn't a very 'fatherly' figure in the fact that he'd never seen him outside the battlefield.

Loud, crow-like laughs and unnecessarily loud talking immediately drew his eyes to the right, as if to capture the sound with the wrong physiological attribute. He peeked around a small division. What caught Scout's attention first were the multitude of women gathered around that teeny, tiny table, more than honestly should have attempted to squeeze their wide, child-bearing hips between one another. From their gaping, partly toothless maws to the buckets of makeup poured into every crease and crevice, it felt more like a red district full of old people rather than home. Second came the fridge and the gracious amounts of food still piled upon the counter, these women deciding that their figures were much more important to ruin on fatty Boston chicken and Bonk! Cola.

Scout's mother, noticing her son making an attempted sneaky beeline for the nourishment, placed her hand of cards upon the wood and opened her arms expectantly then shrieked, "My boy is home! Come give yeh muddah a kiss. Say hullo to everyone!"

'Everyone' was such a strong term, because it looked like half of these women weren't even people.

"You remember Missus Jahnson?" Said Scout's mother after commanding her child to give her a hug and _good_ kiss on the cheek, directing to the woman immediately across from her. Missus Johnson was an impossibly old woman, wrinkles covering every inch of her skin, making her look more like a lizard than a person. She couldn't have been any less than eighty with no less than twenty pounds of makeup just on her face, like someone from a senior citizen red light district. He'd known Missus Johnson since he was just a little boy - even then he remembered her seeming older than his own grandmother - and those memories of slimy, red, sticky kisses he had long since blocked out.

Until now, at least.

Missus Johnson mimicked Scout's mother, thrusting her arms forward. Her lips pursed into a lumpy 'O' shape and she shut her eyes tight. "Come're! Giff an' 'ol Missues a kuss, boy!" A lack of teeth and that Boston accent made her nigh-unintelligible to the foreigner.

Scout looked at her as if she'd just asked for sex. He looked to that bob-haired woman for mercy. The anger burning beneath her eyes was enough to make Scout lean in cheek first with a plastic smile. She grabbed his cheeks and forcibly turned his lips to hers, smashing them together in a display of passionate old person love.

He couldn't scream. Any noise he made was countered by her own moans. "Aww, ain't that just dahling?" Cooed Scout's mother while he wiped away the smeared remnants of her House of Wray No. 7 red lipstick, nearly crying because of how _vile_ the combination of cigarettes and potato salad turned out to be. "Don't fehget Missus O'Mally and Missus Byrne!"

Scout's eyes rolled to the other end of the table. One woman, Miss O'Mally, immediately made him think of the Heavy. Thick red hair coated her large arms, and her expression didn't shift from a jowl-accented scowl even when she was laughing. Her eyebrows furrowed together; a form of surprise, he could only assume. She stood up to take him in a crushing hug - all six feet, three hundred pounds of her - and just as he contemplated hopping away and getting a hotel, a beauty caught his eye.

Thanks to the blood rushing to his head and feet from Miss O'Mally's vice-like arms, it took Scout a little to fully comprehend who this woman was. She couldn't have been more than in her early twenties. Enough makeup to bring out her features: beautiful brown eyes with long lashes, high cheek bones and a nose that sloped down into a cute, round little tip. Her ears were slightly pointed, and chestnut locks fell into a small bob. She smiled a little at Scout, thin lips becoming a mere line; but that was okay! It was adorable. He found her adorable. A real woman's woman. Very unlike those crows that often hung around the Boston fast food joint, who absolutely couldn't_ resist_ Scout and his bad-boy ways. In his mind, at least.

"Yeah, uh, I remembeh, uh, Missus Byrne. Where do I remembeh yeh from again? Name sounds familiah, sweetheaht." He took a chair (there were always extra chairs lying around, just in case his brothers actually did make an appearance) and moved it closer to her, straddling it in the improper way that men so like to do. He took her hand in his; she giggled, a soft, lovely chime. His eyes couldn't help but wander across her frame. Petite and a little curvy. Just like he liked them. Fashionable, too: a groovy, blue-and-black dress with stripes going every which-way hugged all those places he adored. Long legs, heels to top them off so elegantly.

"You remembeh Missus Byrne from school!"

Scout was barely listening to his mother, already mentally planning out his moves on Byrne. He flexed an arm. He cocked a brow, pursed his lips attractively. She blushed. Oh yeah. That was the stuff. "You uh, from around here?" Came the question that proved he hadn't been paying attention. She nodded a slightly, a mere twitch of the head that made her shiny round earrings sway in the light ever so gracefully. God, why hadn't he seen her before? And why hadn't he hit on her yet?

Scout's mother shrugged a little. "Guess yeh out, Maddie! Come on! Mama's gotta win her a new pair-a-shoes!"

The son shot his caregiver a look of bewilderment. Had she just given them full privileges to do what they wanted? Too distracted at the prospect of gaining enough notoriety in her own Bridge club so that she could move on to the big times, she didn't even notice the pair as they slipped up to Scout's room; or those sweet nothings he was murmuring to her which elicited soft, breathy giggles.

He couldn't resist. Mom wouldn't hear- hell, he could barely hear himself think, over how much yelling and false threats poured out of her mouth. The two pressed up against the hallway wall. Scout immediately smashed their lips together. He moaned, grinding against her, feeling the effects of being sexually starved for the past seven months coming in fast. She writhed beneath him. Another moan, this one from her, the same frequency and pitch as his, with the same amount of want and need-

Something firm pressed against his own. Wait a minute.

He pulled back in shock, looking down with eyes that had become wide as an elephant's behind.

That woman was a man.

"You're... you're a...?" He managed to stutter.

Maddie smiled, smoothing down the bulge in her dress. Scout couldn't take his eyes off of it. "'S been a long time. Micheal. Micheal Byrne. Yeh remembeh me, right?" Scout's assumption of her - it's - his voice, went flying out of the window. A throaty baritone that might have made for a lovely singing voice lazily spat those words at him. It seemed so surreal. Almost like he had some sort of recording device that could play back a man's voice. If only it were that kind of joke! Memories of this man came flooding back. One of the biggest jocks on the football team, a senior to Scout's freshman-hood, as popular as popular could be.

And now here he was standing before Scout with the other's DNA dripping slowly down his jaw.

"MA!"

Scout was down the stairs in a flash, completely ignoring the transvestite in order to seek out his mother's guidance. The three women looked lazily to the boy, who had taken the time to fall flat on his face in attempts to leap past the last few steps (which had been proven to never work, even with long legs such as his). "You don- I just- _MA! YOU AIN'T LISTENIN'_!" His voice cracked on the last words. She threw down a couple of cards.

"No trump! Ha! Jus' like I said I would." Scout's mother gave a sideways glance to her son, eyebrows raised in boredom, like this was an everyday routine. "I tol' you that you knew 'em."

Scout fainted right on the spot.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note:<strong>

Abrupt ending.  
>Working on the Tentaspy story I'm so sorry I'm taking forever. ;_;<p> 


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